The Terrifying Glory of God

Now the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. Then the

Philistines took the ark of God and brought it to the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon. Then the

Ashdodites arose early the next morning, and behold, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of Yahweh.

So they took Dagon and set him in his place again. But they arose early the next morning, and behold,

Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of Yahweh, and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off on the threshold.

Only the trunk of Dagon was left to him." The Westminster Catechism No. 1, which you all know, says the question, what is the chief end of man?

The answer is, man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Last week,

I think Bart asked the question, what is Israel without their God? And the answer is, they're just like everybody else.

They're nothing. They are a small, weak people who has no particular claim to any kind of special power or anything of the sort.

But God chose a people to show His glory, and that people was small. They were not great among the nations, so that they could see that the nations would see the greatness of the

God of Israel. And this week, we're going to look at a contrast.

I have long thought of 1 Samuel as a book of contrast. The largest story, the largest bulk of 1

Samuel being the contrast between the King Saul and the anointed King David. But here we see brought into focus the contrast between gods, and also a contrast between peoples, and a respect for God that comes out of blindness.

You're going to hear this morning a lot of parallels. Things that, as we look out our window, as we watch the news, and as we engage on the internet, and we talk to our neighbors, that you're going to see a lot of parallels to our nation.

And that's true, and that's right. But what I really want to think about this morning is looking and examining our lives, and seeing where have we become complacent in our worship.

Because that is the story of the Israelites. Understand this, the zeal for the

Israelites had gotten to such a point that they had let their temple, where God dwelled with man with his promises in Leviticus, they had allowed it to become a place where it was dangerous for women to come in the door because they were going to get prostituted out.

And where people were getting their sacrifices stolen by wicked churchmen, so to speak.

And the people, as often is the case, did not demand reform. They simply, quietly, went about their business.

And God was not going to allow that to stand. So it is today that what typifies our nation, and more focused, what typifies our churches and our families, is complacency.

Where we see the evil that invades our churches, that invades our family.

We see the passiveness. We see men trading out their God -given responsibility to work, and to disciple their children and their wives, and they trade that in for hobbies, and being outside of the house, and amassing riches and wealth.

We see women trading out their sacred responsibility of raising up their children in the admission of the

Lord, to go spend their effort with corporate bosses, and then to blow off steam with wine night with a couple of friends.

And our whole family is typified by the desire to get away from one another. That is the complacency that has invaded our ranks.

We're not special. We're not better than the Israelites. We're just like them.

And the story today is a shameful story of blindness, where, in our flesh, we will laugh at the dumb

Philistines this morning. And rightfully so, we should laugh at their absurdity, because they are quite absurd. But what's lost in this is that the

Philistines actually respected God more than the Israelites at this time. Because if you'll remember back to last week, there was a roar in the camp, and the

Philistines, they heard, oh man, woe to us, curses be on us, the gods have come.

We have never seen anything like this before. And God banished the Egyptians and drowned them.

Men, we better man up. We better get ready, because we're fighting against these powerful gods.

And so the Philistines do man up, while the Israelites rely on their religious relics and their superstition to go out and have

God lead the battle for them. And because of their complacency and their idiocy, the Philistines swamp them.

And the glory of Eli falls to the ground and breaks its neck. And there's a parallel that must be seen between blindness and necks.

Because Dagon, the great god, the father of Baal, the great god of the Philistines and Mesopotamia, is going to have his head cracked off.

And the parallel is obvious here, that there is no glory in snubbing your nose at the glorious God.

And so I have entitled the message this morning, The Terrifying Glory of God. Because it's something that we often miss.

And so as we pick up the story, if you'll remember last week, the Philistines had wiped out the Israelites on the battlefield.

They had taken the Ark of the Covenant that the Israelites had sinfully brought out to battle with them.

And the Philistines bring it in. And what we have to understand is the representatives of God, because we are, we know the verse, right?

Everyone who is an RA in their childhood knows this verse. We are ambassadors for Christ. 2

Corinthians 5 .20, okay? We are ambassadors for Christ. Here's what that means. That's a sovereign duty that means that we, when we claim the name of Christ, we represent him.

And so when we fall to the enemy, it signals that they have defeated not us, but they have defeated our

God. Whenever the church falls, whenever Christians fall, the enemy looks and thinks that God's nothing.

And so the Philistines think likewise. They think, woe to us, this God has come. They defeat him militarily.

And then they bring the Ark of the Covenant in. And it's very interesting where they put it. They put it in the same building as their great

God, Dagon. The reason why is because they're going to say, see how

Dagon rules over this God of the Israelites. The God of the Israelites was strong, but our

God is obviously much stronger. So point one here is very simple. God decapitates

Dagon. The great virile God of battle who delivered victory over the vaunted

Israelites is brought low. But there's a little bit of a history to Dagon.

He doesn't come a lot into the scriptural narrative, but where he does, it's very interesting.

He's an interesting God because we hear a lot about the Baals, right, all throughout the Old Testament. But we do know that Dagon is an older God than the

Baals, that he was worshipped in 3000 BC. He probably looked like a merman, all right, human head, fish torso, as is vividly shown on the coloring sheet.

But he was not really a God of fish. He was really a God over fertility and multiplication because the people will always create idols in order to deliver their own felt needs and their idols will resemble themselves.

What we really want, when truth be told, is a God who's just a little bit bigger, more powerful version of ourself.

Because ultimately humankind wants to sit on the throne. He was an ancient

God of the Amorites in this region, the Fertile Crescent. And his worship was tolerated by the

Lord God, Yahweh, for centuries. Maybe an echo to Genesis 15, when

God makes the promise to Abram that he will take this land, but that his people, that his seed will be taken captive for 400 years until the iniquity of the

Amorites is filled up. Part of the way that the Amorites were filling up their iniquity was by the worship of this

God, Dagon. But we are going to see a pathology of Philistine stupidity on display here.

Because what happens is, the first part of the story, they bring this Ark of the

Covenant in, they sit it in by Dagon as if it's under Dagon, and then the next morning

Dagon falls over. And so, in their blindness and stupidity, they pick him up because their

God needs them to pick him up and put him back in his place. But they don't get the message because the next morning he's fallen over and he's ceremonially executed.

His head and his hands cut off. We're going to see echoes of that in how David deals with Goliath later on in the book.

But there's a history with Dagon, and it goes back to the judges. You see, this was the

God that the Philistines were worshiping in a frenzy when Samson came on the scene. In Judges 16, 23, we know the story, right?

Samson, the great tormentor of the Philistines. He has supernatural strength, and he falls in the way that many young men have before him and have since him.

He falls to his lust in taking a young woman who is not his wife, and it is his

Achilles heel, and that's how the Philistines get him. And when they get him, they shear his hair and he loses his strength, and the first thing they do is they gouge out his eyeballs.

Why? Why? Is this not a theme that we're seeing in the ancient world through 1

Samuel? Eli is described twice as being blind. His eyes have set. And the question is, who's really blind?

Because Samson never sees more clearly than when his eyes are gouged out. Because what

Samson does and why he's mentioned in Hebrews 11, there's nothing that we read in Judges that would get Samson put in annals of people that we should follow their faith until this moment.

And it is in Judges 16, 23, it says, Now the lords of the Philistines assembled to offer a great sacrifice to dag on their

God and to be glad, and they said, Our God has given Samson our enemies into our hands.

And so what happens is 3 ,000 Philistines gather to worship their God of battle, their

God of grain, their God of fertility, and they get in a frenzy and they have Samson strapped to two pillars and they're worshiping their

God dag on. And Samson can't see it, but he does hear it.

And this is what Samson says, verse 28, Samson called to Yahweh and said,

O Lord Yahweh, please remember me and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the

Philistines for my two eyes. Seems like a weird prayer, doesn't it? The worship of a false god abounding, his people under duress, and Samson wants to be avenged for the taking of his eyes.

Until we understand that for the Hebrews, the eye was the window into all of the inner workings of the soul.

The eye was how you looked out and how you looked in. And so Samson, in the narrative, there's poetry here that Samson knows that he's had taken from him everything that makes him the warrior that he was.

And so in the juxtaposition, for the first time in a long time, Samson sees and God grants him his plea and Samson pushes the pillars over and destroys all of the

Philistines who were worshiping this false god dag on. And so we would think, right,

Yahweh triumphed. The Philistines should be afraid and they should think, wow, this dag on, that may be the wrong

God. Could be the wrong God because this blind man just killed all of our people that were worshiping dag on.

But that's not the way spiritual sight works. And so as we come into 1

Samuel, we see that the Philistines are still, a few years later, still worshiping this impotent fish god.

Looks like a mermaid. And he's not so great because he is laid low by Yahweh, all right?

So what is the response? And I think that's going to be the key this morning is looking at what is the response of the

Philistines and then what does God do in their idiocy and in their blindness? Because what we understand today, but we don't often practice, is that we want to elevate gods that are every bit as powerless as dag on is.

And this has always been the case. Habakkuk prophesied over his people, and there are many such verses

I could read, but Habakkuk prophesied and he said, what prophet is the graven image when its maker has engraved it or a molten image, a teacher of lies?

For its maker trust in its own making when he fashions speechless idols. In other words, when we fashion idols, we are essentially worshipping our own ingenuity and our own craftiness.

And there are many cases today where this goes on. As we amass teachers who tickle our ears, as we dare not touch the idols of our day.

You know them. It's the thing that it gives you a feeling in the pit of your stomach that I can't say this or I can't attack that.

You found an idol. That's where they are. Because to attack the idols is going to make the idol worshippers hopping mad, which is what happened with the

Philistines. They wanted to pluck out Samson's eyes to show the superiority of their

God because he had defamed their God, dag on. And is

God silent? No, because for the first time in a while, as we read through last week, it seemed like God was fairly silent in 1

Samuel 4. Remember, the people weren't listening to the voice of Samuel. But here God is going to speak.

And this is called God glorified through judgment. We don't like to think of this. Look, we think of God as being glorified through his mercy and his compassion.

But the cross, the cross is equal parts, mercy and compassion and grace and judgment and wrath.

Because as John writes down in chapter 3, that the cross is going to be condemnation to those who are perishing already.

They don't know the Son of God and they are blind. And so the cross ultimately brings that condemnation.

So God is always glorified through judgment also. And God's judgment is a kindness to people who are languishing in blindness because judgment is what wakes people up.

When we are comfortable, we're not looking for answers. Key verse, verse 6 of 1

Samuel 5, it says, your translation may say heavy, Bart's done work on that word.

Now the hand of Yahweh was glorious or heavy against the Ashdodites.

And he made them desolate and struck them with tumors, both Ashdod and its territories.

This is where God speaks in this chapter and he speaks through glorious judgment.

His judgment is heavy. It's not like the heaviness of Eli that self -condemned him and fell and broke his neck.

The judgment of God is glorious because it points to himself. Now for us as his people, we long for the discipline of God, not the judgment of God.

The judgment of God is completed for his people in the cross of Christ. There is no judgment for you who follow

Christ this morning. But the call of Christ is to everyone. And for those who do not follow

Christ, for those who are blind, there is judgment falling out that will by no means be cleared for those who trample underfoot the blood of Christ.

And so it is that the Philistines have to learn some lessons here. And here's the first lesson.

If you trifle with powerful things, you better expect to have powerful consequences.

And so the Ark of the Covenant, remember the Philistine, this is a mockery, right? Last chapter, they were terrified of the

Ark of the Covenant. They were terrified at what was about to happen to them. In this chapter, they are blaspheming the

Ark of the Covenant by saying Dagon is much greater. Even when Dagon falls over and his head's cut off, they think, what we got to do here is we got to get this other

God away from us. Logically, logically, would we not think we're worshiping the wrong

God here? But logic has nothing to do with spiritual realities. You don't logic your way into the kingdom of heaven.

Spiritual blindness has to be taken away by God because salvation is a miracle. Don't forget that.

Don't make commonplace something that is a miracle of God. And our hearts grow cold and our hearts grow complacent because we start to think, maybe

I had something to do with this. Maybe I started thinking about this God and maybe I honored him and maybe

I started to believe his promises and it was really because I believed these promises that I'm now saved.

Be careful, Christian. That is the pathway to destruction. There's no escaping.

And what we're going to learn through the rest of this chapter is there is no escaping the glorious hand of judgment of God.

From Ashdod to Gath to Ekron, there is no escaping his mighty hand. Ashdod was ravaged.

It was made desolate. We know what that means, right? There wasn't anything going on there. There was no economy.

And this was the best one. Ashdod got it the lightest of the three places it went because all they got was desolation and tumors, okay?

And the tumors were probably caused by a rodent -borne disease which is going to come into play next chapter.

So what do they do? Do they get on their knees and repent to the God that's afflicting them with tumors?

The God that's beheaded their own God? No. What they do is they call together a council of elders, a political council, and they say, what are we going to do here?

And the answer is, let's send it to Gath because Gath is a little bit more Hebrew -friendly.

Gath is the part of the Philistine Empire that has a little bit more of a Jewish influence on it.

There's more Israelites there. David's going to take asylum at some point here. And so Gath, let's go there.

And what happens? Well, the hand of the Lord was against this city with very great confusion.

And he smote the men of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them. What happens?

Well, when your response to God is, get God as far away from me as possible, when he created everything and is everywhere, he's omnipresent, then what's going to happen is you're going to increase the judgment because you're not getting it yet.

And so what happens to Gath is they get a new confounding put on them, and that is that they become stupid.

A tremendous confusion is put on them. And confusion is terrifying, is it not?

Confusion is a terrifying thing. More on that in a little bit. So what do we do?

We can't handle it in Gath. We've got the tumors and the confusion. We're all going crazy here, so let's send it up to Ekron.

So the art goes to Ekron, and what happens? We get the plagues. We get the tumors. We get the desolation.

We get the confusion. And now what? We get death as the people in Ekron start to die.

Verse 12 tells us the men who did not die were smitten with tumors. And so what's the idea?

We've got to get this God out of here. And the end of this chapter, very sadly, says that they cried out to heaven.

The cry of the city went up to heaven. But it's not the right kind of cry. See, understand that the judgment of God is a kindness that is a means that can lead men to the end of their own devices.

And this is the way it goes. This is the way it goes. When we're fat and happy and comfortable, as we have been for a very, very long time in America, then we get a spiritual complacency and a spiritual blindness that just gets ingrained and ingrained and ingrained.

Because as long as the food is flowing and the good times are flowing, we think to ourselves, it's all good, we don't need

God. And then even when a great panic comes on, it's a kindness. And in 2020, a great panic and confusion came on the people, and it busted churches wide open, and it closed the doors on them to where people couldn't even come in.

And the response of most in America was deep complacency and compliance. And the reason why is because our judgment is not full yet.

The iniquity has not filled up. And the beatings will continue until morale improves, as I like to say.

We have been given over. But God's judgment is a kindness, because in the midst of something that none of us could have imagined in 2020, in fact, if I had laid out the case for you in 2019 for what was about to happen, you would have thought that I was absolutely insane.

And you would have called me a nutjob conspiracy theorist, and you would have not wanted me anywhere near a pulpit, because it was too crazy to believe.

So what's the next thing? Who knows? But here's what's happening. We're just shuffling the

Ark of the Covenant proverbially around our cities. There's no repentance.

Our land doesn't repent. Our land's overwhelming cry is, Get God out of here!

Who does that sound like? And then we're surprised. We're surprised when the birth rate plummets, when families are destroyed, when the suicide rate increases dramatically among our teenagers.

And we wonder, God, are you ever going to show kindness on us? And the answer is, we're not at the end.

We're probably closer to the beginning than the end. Just in the church, look at what we've done.

And we've seen startling examples of it in the last couple of weeks. We've been given over to the worship of Moloch.

He was an idol that delivers the felt need of consequence -free sex. He was the demon god of human sacrifice.

How do I know this? Because the church is totally non -involved. We look at the slaughter of our neighbor, the most innocent among us, and we're afraid of sounding too political to speak against it.

That is pervasive in the church today. The simplest topic for preachers to preach on is one that we are afraid of because our pulpits are inhabited by hirelings who will not prophetically preach the

Word of God because we're afraid. And I can feel it. When I start to want to push those idols, you can feel the pressure.

You can feel that it's going to make people uncomfortable, even in this place. We abound with pro -life arguments that limit the sacrifices and not try to end them.

We victimize the wrong people. Murderers are not victims. There's one victim in abortion, and that's the one who's murdered.

You want to go to sexual perversion. The United Methodists are just the latest of many, and they put on full display a once -great denomination, our brothers.

We sing songs by their patriarchs. And what we often, in the

Reform camp, is what we like to do is we like to look down our noses at the United Methodists and we say, man, what a bunch of morons.

But instead, what we should see is that the judgment of God is severe. And when we lose our love for His Word, then judgment's coming.

There's a great confusion among our people. There's a great confusion in the Reform camp.

There's a great confusion among the Southern Baptists. They don't know what a pastor is. We got to study for a year to find out what a pastor is.

There's a great panic. What's going to happen if Biden wins again? There's a pastor who acts blind like Eli instead of prophetic.

There are divisions as we compete with each other within the brotherhood for money, fame, and influence. Those are death traps for pastors.

Money, fame, and influence. It is an intoxicating thing to start to think to yourself that people are gathering together to hear your words.

May God deliver me from that. And Bart and every other man who stands behind the pulpit and tries to preach the

Word of God. And we hate one another and we hate those who are taller, who are given more talents because we want a piece of their pie.

We have small tertiary disagreements that swell into deep divides. That's what confusion was like for the

Philistines. Don't you know they were fighting with each other all the time? That's the madness. We have deep divides within the

Reform camp about what eschatology we have, about where does natural law fit into the whole thing.

What about our political ideas? Deep divides. Are you a cessationist or a continuationist?

And we divide churches over it. And we hate each other. And there's no unity.

And the reason we have no strength is because we think like children. We cannot put things in their correct categories and deal with disagreement and love each other because we know that when the people are unified under their

King David, the Israelites have strength. They are fearful.

When they're divided under the blindness of Eli, they are ripe for the taking. Want me to poke one right here?

Here we go. Makes me nervous. We look to the

Constitution and the democracy as our savior. We have too long fretted over political outcomes while having no true involvement in them as the church.

We hide behind 501c3 status. We spend the most time with each other arguing about how we're going to vote.

And we spend effort arguing about how we're going to vote when voting is the least important thing we do politically in this country.

What about trying to change hearts and minds? What about bringing the Word of God to bear on politics?

And yet, we get together and we talk about how we're going to vote. The judgment of God is on His church.

We look at the above and we say, This is our natural impulse, isn't it? Thank goodness we don't have these problems at Covenant Baptist Church.

It is the mantra of everyone in our age. That doesn't happen at my school. That doesn't happen at my church.

I'm so glad that my company's not like that. But it betrays us and it conceals the pride and independence that we exert.

So I'm going to ask you some questions. I have to. How often are we on our knees in prayer? It is a building block of this church.

When you wake up first thing in the morning, what do you do? Do you thank God for His morning mercy?

Or do we jump on to social media? Do we love the sin among us by people -pleasing and shirking godly rebuke?

Boy, I hope not. And there's things that are uncomfortable. There's things that are really uncomfortable to step into.

Are you desperately hungering for the Word of God? Do you read it every day? Do you meditate on it?

How's the memorization going? Do you have a bank of it? Look, we're so illogical.

We think that the world's all going to end. And at the same time, we treat the

Word of God like we're always going to have it with us. We need to store those treasures in our hearts.

You want to talk about prepping and future -proofing? Memorize the Word of God so that it will always be there.

I did some research this week. I hate when I go at contemporaneous here. Sorry, no notes. I did some research this week on the martyrs,

Latimer and Ridley. And Latimer had memorized the entire New Testament because he sat in a prison cell for months and months and months.

And he hid the Word of God in his heart. And we think to ourselves, especially on the right, we often think,

I would die for my beliefs. And yet, we won't even prepare by treating what is holy as being holy.

It's the sin of the Israelites. The temple is common. The Word of God is common. It's on my computer.

It's on my cell phone. I've got 45 copies of it in my house. Is it in our heart?

The finger is pointing at me. Are we sacrificing our comfort to husband our wives, to disciple our children, and to honor our parents?

These things don't happen naturally without us intentionally focusing on them.

Husbands, you're going to want to love your work. You're going to want to love your recreation. You're going to want to love your little games.

And you're going to want to love to eat and sit on a couch more than you're going to want to love your wife and your children. Because you will, if you are not treasuring these things, you will amass for yourself things that get in the way of God's calling for you.

Our call is to shepherd and love our wives. Our call is to discipline and disciple our children.

Our call is to lay down our lives for our wives so that we would win their hearts, we would win their loyalty, and we would win their respect for us to lead them.

Children, obey your parents. It's hard, isn't it? Because sometimes it seems like we're wrong, and sometimes you don't understand us.

But there's great blessing in obeying your parents. I didn't do it all the time, obviously, as a sinful kid.

But kids, let me give you a vision of the future. When you obey your parents, they turn into deep, abiding friendships and relationships.

And at some point, because the world is a comedy, at some point, the script flips, and we take care of our parents.

And there is nothing more God -honoring than to take care of those who are weak to those who sacrifice to us and sacrifice for them.

Our nursing homes abound because Christians hate the Word of God, and they don't listen.

Is Christ truly our Lord who feeds us, or do we look to idols that resemble ourselves to find comfort? What is the thing you want to evangelize?

For the Philistines, it was the God of fertility and grain. They wanted food, and they wanted multiplication.

Sex and food. The gladiator games. That's what they wanted.

It was their base desires. And for us, what we're willing to evangelize is what our heart is being drawn to.

It can be sports, it can be hobbies, it can be diets, it can be any number of things.

And what we do is we start to put our sanctification in the hands of those things.

The words that come out of your mouth are a good clue. For me, I had to look face to face at this last summer, and I had to ask, what are the words that come out of my mouth?

Are they curses? Are they loud about our fleshly loves? Or are they filled and abounding with the grace and the truth that comes from our

Savior? Understand this. Complacency in these areas, complacency in loving your neighbor, in honoring your parents, in obeying your parents, in discipling your children, in loving your wife, in honoring your husband.

Complacency in those areas leads to the full -blown idiocy that we see in 1 Samuel 4 and 5.

Absolute idiotic nonsense. And this brings us to the last part of this. We can see this when we have, quote, solid brothers who turn into proud, lying, immoral cowards that are craven.

We wonder, how in the world can this happen? It happens through the small degradation of treating what is holy as something that is common.

And church is where we do that. We're in a holy place. This is not a commonplace.

Let's end here on two frightening realities. Frightening reality number one is the fact that God causes blindness.

Oh, stupid Philistines. Did you know that the Philistines were blind because God caused them to be blind? Samson destroying the

Dagon worshippers should have taught them something. It didn't teach them anything. Dagon falling over taught them nothing.

Him being ceremonially executed taught them nothing. They developed a superstition to protect their

God. They wouldn't step on the threshold anymore after this event. And they never thought to themselves, maybe we got the wrong

God. The plagues, the tumors, the confusion, the death only led to them in their blindness trying to get rid of God.

Not to worship Him. We're no different today. We're no different.

Consider that in Christendom, we are so biblically illiterate that we fawn over people who say

Jesus, like Kanye West, like Jordan Peterson, more recently

Joe Rogan. And we think, wow, things are happening.

It's happening because we're involved in celebrity worship just like our culture. Instead of worshiping the one true

God, we pine for approval from the Philistines. Consider, that's why we wanted

Kanye so much to be real, right? It's not because we care about Kanye.

It's because we care about the Philistines. Because we think, that gives us legitimacy.

Kanye, he owns hip hop. What if he's a Christian? That makes us cool. Jordan Peterson, he's the smartest.

We want to look smart. We're biblically illiterate. God has to remove blindness.

We can't tolerate evil. That's what propagates the blindness. But instead, we surround ourselves with people who will call it out.

Blindness is terrifying because we don't control it. Do you understand that?

We don't control it. You have no control over your blindness. It's given by God for His purposes and His glory.

Blindness is terrifying because God's glory displayed through judgment should be what man fears above all else.

What should you fear more than the Creator who is everywhere, who made everything, who knows every thought and is powerful to do anything that He wants?

And you're at odds with Him? What else should you be afraid of?

Biblically, the answer is absolutely nothing. There is nothing that we should be afraid of besides the power of God and His terrifying reality of His judgment against sinners who rebel against Him.

But we fear many things. And so what we should do is we should pray to not be blind.

Here's the second terrifying reality. And this one, people don't like this one very much. They didn't like the first one.

They really don't like this one. God does not listen to the wicked. He does not listen to them.

We hear at verse 12, the cry of the city went up to heaven. So God came and saved the

Philistines? No. No. So God opened the eyes of the Philistines? No. They continue in their blindness and we'll see next week that what their solution is is to make blasphemous golden objects of all the unclean things and send them on a cart with the ark back to Israel.

That's their solution. That's their man -made wisdom. Godly sorrow is a sweet thing.

But the sorrow of man and worldly sorrow leads to death. 1 Corinthians 7, 10. Godly sorrow produces repentance without regret leading to salvation.

There is no salvation without repentance. You are one thing.

God makes you another. The only way you can repent is to have your blindness taken away.

We have to cry out to God to save us. But look at it. The sorrow of the world brings about death.

Why? Because the sorrow of the world ignores God. It focuses on ourselves and our own problems.

And ultimately, we end up fearing the wrong thing and we become extremely stupid. Extraordinarily stupid.

Worldly sorrow is, I got caught, I feel bad, and then this feeling will edge off after a while and I'll go right back to the thing

I was doing. For men, for young men especially, this is the porn cycle. The porn cycle is, oh man,

I can't believe I did that. I feel so bad. And then the next day, we're right back at it.

The reason for that is you don't hate the sin. You hate the guilt. God hates the sin.

And God has taken care of the guilt. The guilt is all on Christ. The sin is what put him there.

And the blindness is what keeps us going back to lick up the vomit time and time again.

We have to take the blinder off. And the way we do that is we cry out to God. What hope is there for us if God doesn't listen to the wicked and everyone who's blind is wicked and God causes the blindness?

What's the hope for us? This is a glorious verse. 1 Corinthians 7, 9.

The one preceding the last one I just read. I now rejoice not that you were made sorrowful but that you were made sorrowful to repentance for you were made to have godly sorrow so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us.

Isn't that the way of repentance? Do you miss the sin? No. No. Repentance is a sweet gift of Christ.

Because when we're walking towards death what we need more than anything is to walk the other direction.

And when we walk the other direction it is like Christian on the pilgrimage. It's a hard road but it leads to glory.

And that hard road develops godly character. Psalm 146, 8 says

Yahweh opens the eyes of the blind. Yahweh raises up those who are bowed down.

Yahweh loves the righteous. Did you know that God makes you righteous and then He loves you?

And that love never changes because God can't change. He's immutable.

He responds to us never. Do you understand that? God does not respond to you.

God makes you respond to Him. If God can change then

He's no God at all. And so God perfect in holiness, perfect in love, perfect in righteousness.

We don't even understand these words without Him. He pulls the blinders off of you. He opens your eyes unto

Himself and then He loves you. Isaiah 35, verses 4 and 5 says

Say to those with an anxious heart are there any anxious in here? I know there are.

I know there's those that struggle with it, with anxiety. What should you say? What should you hear?

Be strong. Fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance.

The recompense of God will come. But He will save you. Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped.

Jesus chastised Nicodemus in chapter 3, verse 3 and He said to him Truly, truly,

I say to you unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. 2

Corinthians 3, verse 15 But to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their heart but whenever a person turns to the

Lord the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.

But we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory just as from the

Lord, the Spirit. What is the end of 1 Samuel 5? There's two ways to go.

Don't go the way of the Philistines. Here's the way of the Philistines. The way of the Philistines is to worship a false

God to put your hope in your own military conquest to worship a

God that you have to prop up with your own hands that can let you down and then when the consequences of that fake

God come on your head then just cry out to heaven. What was that cry you think though?

I think that cry was please stop. What do we do? Please stop.

Stop the tumors or we have the way of the righteous.

And the way of the righteous is this, right? We have to be born again. We have to be a new creature.

And let me tell you this morning if you want to be a new creature that's not your logic working.

It's not my convincing arguments. It's not the cautious case study of the

Philistines. It's the spirit who takes away blindness. And when the blindness is gone what you see is glorious.

It is great to walk in the path of the Lord. My life scripture passage is

Psalm 1 and he says there that we will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water.

What does that person do? They meditate on the law of God day and night. That person will sit among the assembly of the righteous.

Do you know what that means? That means that God not only takes our blindness off so that we see his law and we see his goodness and his character.

He also brings us into his assembly and he sits with us and we take his counsel and we love him.

And there is where peace and unity abounds. And that is the future for Christians. As bad as it is here as bad as it looks

God has a plan and he is taking the blindness off of people and he is using means to do it.